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Updated: June 15, 2025
I could picture it to myself so vividly, those Roman meadows of two thousand years ago: hot, a little sterile, with thickets of almost petrified shrubs, and evergreen oaks like the stony moorland of Limoise, where I had experienced precisely the pastoral charm that I discovered in this description of a past time.
One inhuman professor had instituted Thursday tasks, and it was necessary for me to drag my text and copy-books with me to Limoise; my beloved holidays, spent in the sweet open air, were overcast by their dark shadow. One evening at about eight o'clock the much desired storm broke upon us with superb fury.
Nothing in my estimation was so delightful as that journey to Limoise. We scarcely ever went in a carriage, for it was not more than three and a half miles distant; to me, however, it seemed very far, almost lost in the woods. It lay toward the south, in the direction of those distant, sunny lands I loved to think of.
Perhaps if the Big Ape could but have divined the causes that led to my momentary inattention it might have brought about an understanding between us. One Thursday evening at Limoise, just before the inevitable hour for my departure, I went up alone to the large, old room on the second floor in which I slept.
In preceding chapters I have not said much about that Limoise which was the scene of my initiation into nature and its wonders. My entire childhood is intimately connected with that little corner of the world, with its ancient forests of oak trees, and its rocky moorlands covered here and there with a carpet of wild thyme and heather.
Those Thursdays at Limoise when the fierce heat of the noon-day sun overwhelmed everything, and the country side lay asleep and silent under its pitiless rays, it was my habit to clamber up to the top of the old wall that enclosed the garden, and there I sat astride and immovable for a long time. The branching ivy reached to my shoulders and innumerable flies and locusts buzzed around me.
On our way through the village we passed the tiny church, a wonder of the twelfth century, built in the rarest and most ancient Romanesque style; and then as the shadows of evening deepened we saw, in the semi-darkness before us, something that had the form of tall dark legions: it was the forest of Limoise, composed almost wholly of evergreen oaks, whose foliage is very dark and sombre.
There was suddenly brought back to my mind my first impression of a strong wind in the woods of Limoise, in the province of Saintonge, twenty-eight years ago, in a month of March of my childhood. I refer too often, I fancy, to my childhood; I am foolishly fond of it.
Or, if the others had gone in, I was sure to find aunt Bertha there alone; she was a very independent person, and she dared defy even the dew and evening chill. After kissing and embracing me she pretended to smell of my clothes, and after sniffing a minute, to make me laugh, she would say: "Ah! you smell of Limoise, my darling."
But here the secret working of self consciousness is almost too entangled with the things of the past for me to explain it. We were visiting at a country place called Limoise, a place that at later time played a great part in my life. It belonged to neighbors and friends, the D s, whose house in town was directly next to ours.
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